Thursday, 1 October 2009

Unjustified blind faith in technology

More by luck than anything, I found my automatic backups weren't working. And hadn't worked for 9 months...
Having spent perhaps a grand on backup kit over the years (including 440 quid to recover a crashed hard drive) this hurt. In the hope it helps at least one person to avoid similar problems, here's the tale:-

The backup drive (NAS, at the other end of the house, connected by ethernet-over-mains) needs restarting manually after any power cut. I'd forgotten to do this. (We get a lot of power cuts. I read somewhere that the airport takes priority when suppliers are low, and on balance I'd prefer them to keep the runway lights on. Even if I'm not flying!)

The backup software didn't tell me. I assume if it can't see the drive (which was still switched off) it assumes I know what I'd doing. And I assumed it would tell me.

As far as I can tell the NAS drive got full sometime along the way. On previous occasions I'm sure it warned me, but - perhaps coincidentally ...

When it's a new, strange or forgotten area, I need instructions to start from what I don't know, not what the author does. And she did. Written Jan 2006, the page has had over half a million hits. She deserves every one.